Citizens—farmers, business owners, fishermen, workers, teachers and scientists—agree: our planet is changing.From droughts in California to mudslides in Texas, oil spills in Louisiana to earthquakes in Oklahoma, it is clear that human activities threaten the natural life-support systems that we all depend on in our daily lives. The environment—the foundation for our health, economic prosperity, and social well-being—is in danger. Welcome to the age of global change.

‘Global change’ is a vague phrase, making it hard to recognize in day-to-day life. To better understand both our impacts and potential solutions to them, we have broken down humanity’s impacts on the environment into five key problems: climate disruption, biodiversity loss, human population change, pollution, and the spread of invasive species & diseases.

The impacts of global change are not the same everywhere in the world. Even in the United States, global change does not manifest in the same ways throughout the country. This means citizens of the US will see global change through different lenses depending on where they live and how they make their living.

We created this ‘story map’ to help people recognize the impacts of global change already occurring in their own lives and communities. The story map contains a collection of geo-located news articles (from newspapers, radio, and television) describing the impacts that our changing environment exerts on cities, farms, and natural landscapes. These articles provide a diversity of perspectives from citizens across the US, and complement existing scientific knowledge of global change.Through this website, you can learn more about both the scientific and human dimensions of global change. You can search through examples of the key problems of global change to better recognize them in your own backyard. You can also explore the impacts that your state, county, and maybe even neighbors have already reported by reading up on your home region. Listen to some of our podcasts to see how global change is impacting food production in the US. Lastly, if you are a teacher, please feel free to download our teaching materials.

About This Project

We are a group of students and instructors in a class at Stanford University, California (Bio 128/Earth Systems 129: Geographic Impacts of Global Change: Mapping the Stories). We recognize that forces of global change (e.g., climate disruption, biodiversity loss, disease, pollution, and population change) impart wide-ranging political, socioeconomic, and ecological impacts, creating an urgent need for science communication.

We collected data for regions of the US using sources ranging from academic journals to popular media, and we created an interactive Story Map merging the scientific and human dimensions of global change. Story maps combine interactive maps and multimedia content into elegant user experiences. They make it easy for you to harness the power of maps to tell your stories. Learn more about story maps here.